So I watched Oculus the other day. The movie is less scary and more psychological. It’s a must-watch for any horror movie fan.
The movie is brilliantly written, well shot, and excellently acted. Shortly into the movie, I suspended my disbelief and “forgot” that I was seeing Amy Pond and Starbuck. And Karen Gillan’s American accent was so spot on that my cohort didn’t realize that she has a native Scottish accent.
Overall, 4 stars out of 5, good movie, strongly recommended. Now for some discussion with lots of spoilers, after the cut.
The best part of the movie is how they left it ambiguous. Is there really an evil mirror that’s killing people? Or are our protagonists just crazy?
Right from the start of the movie, they spare no expense in telling us that our “heroes” suffered childhood psychological trauma. Tim (Brenton Thwaites) is being discharged from the mental hospital, after having finally overcome his bout with crazy. The Doctor tells him in subtle but certain terms that his sister Kaylie (Karen Gillan) wasn’t committed to a mental hospital and that she still has traces of crazy.
Kaylie’s craziness is confirmed when she reveals that she’s been obsessing over the mirror for the last 11 years, having bought their childhood home, tracked down the mirror, got a job at an auction house specifically so she can “borrow” it and destroy it, and set up “safeguards” that make Ghost Hunters look like normal people.
At this point in the movie, Tim is the voice of reason, arguing that everything they remember about the mirror was just a psychological defense mechanism to deal with what happened in their childhood, that there is no evil mirror. Our heroes continue to argue until Kaylie runs out crying, then walks by the mirror room and discovers that the cameras have moved on their own.
So that confirms that the mirror really is evil, right?
Well, not quite. Our heroes review the camera footage and discovered that they moved the cameras while they were arguing. So we don’t see any evidence of an evil mirror, just evidence of two crazy people acting crazy.
The movie also flips back and forth between the past and the present, and the way it’s done shows a clear progression. As the movie starts, scenes in the past are distinct from scenes in the present. After the camera incident, our present heroes are inserted into the past scenes as observers. At this point, they’re still remembering the past (or at least their tainted memories of it), but instead of objective 3rd-person observers, they’re slowly become more and more drawn in by it.
As the movie approaches its climax, the past and present scenes converge until the past and the present are almost indistinguishable. Our heroes flip between being children and being adults even within the same scene. This shows that our heroes have reverted to their child-like states and are now reliving their childhood nightmares.
What about those lights? The movie would have us believe that the evil mirror was extinguishing the lights, but right at the end of the movie, all the lights come back on, as if they were never extinguished to begin with.
And was Kaylie’s fiance Michael (James Lafferty) really there? When Kaylie asks Tim if he sees him, Tim doesn’t confirm one way or another, let alone who he sees (if any). Instead, he points the camera phone at the floor to reveal the broken potted plant. But Kaylie looks at Michael with her camera and sees his dead body, and since cameras don’t lie, he must really be there, right? Well no, recall earlier in the movie when Kaylie turned the cameras back on in the mirror room, Tim saw on screen Kaylie in a distinctly and notably different pose than the actual Kaylie. Finally, at the end of the movie, the cops only mention Kaylie’s death. They don’t mention Michael’s death at all. So what’s more likely? That Michael showed up, got killed, and then got eaten by the mirror? Or that he was never there to begin with?
Speaking of the ending, it was heavily foreshadowed. The first moment Kaylie wakes up in front of the mirror, and immediately rushes to reset the kill switch timer, you just know that someone is going to be offed by that kill switch. It’s just a question of whom and how. And again, when our heroes are about to escape and talk about how the kill switch will destroy the mirror, and then they look in the window and see themselves standing in front of the mirror. Sure, we all hope that both our heroes make it out alive, but let’s be honest, the kill switch is a Chekov’s Gun, and the movie goes out if its way to suggest that it will be used on one (or both) of our heroes.
So which one is it? Have Tim and Kaylie gone into a psychotic breakdown, triggered by their reunion and by the return of the mirror? Or is the mirror truly evil and killing off everyone it comes in contact with? I hope they never make a sequel to this movie, because the ambiguity, the not being sure if the terror is real or if you’re just going crazy, that is the best part of it.
Bonus: Apparently, Karen Gillan will star in Guardians of the Galaxy as a bald blue alien. I never would have recognized her if Wikipedia hadn’t told me.